[mythtv-users] (US) Goodbye to unencrypted QAM...

[Brian Wood]

On Thursday 27 August 2009 11:20:55 David Brodbeck wrote:
> Eric Sharkey wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Ronald Frazier<ron at ronfrazier.net> 
wrote:
> >> Well, the thing is...the only reason I'm considering it is that the
> >> unencrypted digital sounds really nice. Other than that, I'm very
> >> anti-Comcast. It stems back to a lot of things, though primarily the
> >> fact that I went almost 3 days with no internet and only got the
> >> problem resolved after I setup a packet sniffer and told the network
> >> admins exactly how their network was setup wrong
> >
> > Comcast has no monopoly on incompetence.
>
> No, but as Internet providers go they're pretty incompetent.  There are
> better ones out there, although probably not on cable.  Cable companies
> have been monopolies for so long that their customer service muscles
> have atrophied completely.  This is why I currently have Comcast for my
> TV and Speakeasy dry-line DSL for my Internet service.  It would be
> cheaper to get it all from Comcast, but I telecommute and need my
> Internet service to actually *work*.
>
> None of this applies to Comcast's *business* cable Internet service,
> which in my experience gets a whole different tier of support.  Those
> guys seem to know what they're doing and be empowered to fix problems,
> unlike the residential support folks, who can only follow the script.

I have also found that business class service from my cable company (Bresnan) 
is light-years ahead of residential service.

The last time I called due to a problem the cable company truck pulled into my 
driveway while I was still on the line with the sysadmin, who actually seemed 
to know what he was talking about. The tech had the problem solved within 15 
minutes (squirrel chew on the aerial drop).

A call to customer support was answered by a human being on the second ring.

Of course it costs more, but I get no blocked ports, no restrictions on 
servers or anything else I might want to run, no bandwidth limit, static IPs, 
guaranteed level of service (not "up to") and fairly decent service overall.

Of course they do have their problems, recently a 5-hour outage due to 
a "routing problem caused by maintenance work" (at least they admitted it). 
They actually sent me an apology letter, but no credit for lost service, 
apparently I have to be out for at least 24 hours to get that.

You get what you pay for I guess.


-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org